Here we are at the third part of the blog series: Putting Data at the Heart of your CRM Strategy, and it’s all about data quality.

We’ve talked about the importance of having data and technology aligned to get the results we really need. In Part 2 we looked at the importance of CRM automation and dashboards to understand your customer and get real-time metrics of your campaigns.

The next piece of the puzzle is data quality; a crucial component to achieving a streamlined CRM strategy. When data is treated badly, CRM suffers as well. Although intelligent, it’s not able to give us the information we need. The old cliché “garbage in, garbage out” applies.

Data Quality Report

This blog coincides well with the recent release of our new, interactive Data Quality Report where companies can get a health check of their data. A business uploads their contact data on the Data8 website, and in return, receives a Data Quality Report, displayed in an interactive infographic style.

All the contact details in a file are analysed and then a score is produced that measures the quality of the whole file out of one hundred, shown below in orange. The Data Quality Score is a unique feature that can be used to monitor data quality. It will help you answer the key questions ‘How much is my data improving?’ or ‘Where do I need to improve my data?

The report shows the number of contacts that are fully marketable, callable, mailable, emailable and unmarketable, then goes on to illustrate where improvements can be made. The report is available to both B2C and B2B lists.

Detail of Data Quality Report

The following screenshots of the Data Quality Report demonstrate how the Score can be improved by adding information from our aggregated data to make the data more marketable. Each element has an explanation of the data and the business benefits from making any recommended changes. (See table below)

Filling in the Gaps:

Data Capture & Validation

Having established what actions need to be taken to improve data, it’s also important to ensure data coming into the organisation is of the highest quality.

Potential customers, especially professionals are often reluctant to spend time filling in all the contact details you may require, therefore we’ve developed a method of ‘Filling in the Gaps’.

All that’s needed from the prospect is a business email address. Using just the email address, we can immediately populate the database with valuable business information. . Our B2B lead capture API provides access up to 35 fields of information on a company, such as contact details, trading address, financial information, business size, and industry.

Being able to obtain the maximum amount of information from the minimum input by the prospect is a great strategy. It’ makes the enquiry process nice and swift.

Here’s a snapshot of an account in CRM. It’s prepopulated with data that marketing can use (i.e. segmentation by vertical; sales can use before they reach out to a prospect, visit website, easy contact telephone number, get a business size snapshot etc.

Ultimately we want to continue on this journey of combining data and technology to get us the results we desire. It’s enabled us to collaborate with each other, given us an understanding of our customers, enabled us to do more and request less information. We no longer have to manually capture data for our monthly reports, which has saved us a lot of time.

The power of data and technology has enabled us to be more effective and efficient and make smarter business decisions. We have seen this work for us till now and we look forward to continuing to take our practices to the next level.